The rise of streaming shifted the music industry away from heavy reliance on studio album sales in recent years. But John Petrucci said the change didn’t affect Dream Theater much as they focused more on touring.
Asked what turned out to be a silver lining in the band’s lack of commercial success in their early career, Petrucci told Goldmine Magazine, “Well, here’s the interesting thing about that. For Dream Theater, we didn’t really have a lot of commercial success. We did have a song on our second album ‘Images and Words’ [‘Pull Me Under’], which was a rock radio hit and garnered a gold record for us. But other than that, we couldn’t really rely on selling millions of records at first.”
“We started our career with the mindset that our future lies in touring and in live performances,” he continued. “So, we did that very early on. We were an international band, and we developed an international fan base from the get-go. So, we didn’t feel any paradigm shift because we had already established that.”
“We were a major touring band, not reliant on income from record sales, but reliant on income from touring and merchandise and all that stuff. So, it worked in our favor as far as that’s concerned. It’s not like we were a pop band who were just selling millions and millions of millions of records, and then we could play a couple of shows a year. We had to play 150 shows on tour all over the world. That’s how we made our money. Yeah, so that never changed, thankfully.”
Dream Theater is now working on their new album, ‘Parasomnia,’ which is expected to release in February 2025. The lead single from the record, ‘Night Terror,’ came out last month, teasing the band’s overall new sound. John Petrucci led the album’s production with James ‘Jimmy T’ Meslin engineering and Andy Sneap mixing.
To promote ‘Parasomnia,’ Dream Theater recently set on a tour. Their next stop is Copenhagen, Denmark, on November 10.